anted to trust the coming of a
supernatural grace which will illuminate life. Such subjective
illumination is only too apt to reflect the temperament of the
individual and to lack that training and breadth of interest which only
education and opportunity for a varied experience can give. Many of
the values which we prize most highly to-day need the soil of culture
and of a complex civilization before they will flourish. To distribute
them widely is the dearest hope of a democracy which looks beyond the
merely political aspects of social institutions. But such a
distribution is a goal which has conditions which must be mastered by
the bending of a keen social intelligence into the service of a genuine
desire for the extension of well-used leisure. I mean that the task of
modern democracy is the securing of economic well-being and a fair
degree of leisure for the mass of the citizens in order that they may
have the time, the energy, and the opportunity to develop themselves
and to put themselves cooperatively into touch with the pleasant and
creative side of life. But I have already touched upon these problems
of social method and aim in another volume.[2]

It is time that I discussed a question which, I have no doubt, has been
hovering in the background of many a reader's mind. Is it justifiable
to retain the term religion when its ancient setting has been so
completely discarded? I have myself asked this question many a {221}
time. For many years, I felt that it would be better to give up the
word entirely as indissolubly bound up with those ideas and beliefs
which the modern trained mind is outgrowing. But I could not hide from
myself the fact that the consciousness of the time was beginning to
employ it in a freer and more constructive way. It had sensed the
element of devotion and loyalty which religion had, in spite of its
many shortcomings, nourished. How common the phrase is that a man has
made a religion of some interest! The socialist is said to make a
religion of socialism, the social reformer of his work of constructive
philanthropy, the artist of his art. We mean that he has thrown
himself whole-heartedly into some one of these fields. And,
positively, this means that he has found that concrete and living
salvation which ideal effort always brings to a man. He is filled with
the spirit of consuming loyalty to what he values. He has left the
mere conventionalities, the run of use-and-wont behi